On "Writing Studies" and recent projects

"Writing studies," is a somewhat hypothetical discipline (insofar as we still don't see research positions in "writing studies," but rather "new media," "communications," "composition,"  "rhetoric") mentioned in Sid Dobrin's book Postcomposition, as a way to mark a form of disciplinary research apart from "composition," traditionally associated with First Year Writing and 'research' on pedagogical methods. In Dobrin's own words,

Thus, the primary agenda of Postcomposition is to argue for a move
beyond the academic work of composition studies in favor of the revolu-
tionary potential of the intellectual work of writing studies, specifically the
work of writing theory, an endeavor likely best removed from the academic
work of pedagogy and administration." (Postcomposition 24). 

Too often in composition, 'writing' is tied to a subject, usually a student subject. Writing as an expression of that subjectivity or writing as constituting that subjectivity. For Dobrin, 'writing' should be the focus of a 'writing studies' such that the subject cannot be torn from the inscriptional practices themselves. I like to think of this as thinking each inscriptional practice as a performance of a subjectivity, one that can only be described through that particular assemblage of inscriptional practices. That is, "subject," is no longer an expression of a human being or a consciousness, but the particular moment of inscription. The human and nonhuman actants work together to inscribe a 'subject' (if we still even want to preserve that term, so as to preserve a sense of agency). Byron Hawk gets at this through Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of the 'molecular' and the 'molar' in A Counter History of Composition:

"Meaning, purpose, and intention all are molar and separate subject and object, but the desire and the force behind them are molecular and collapse subject and object [. . .] The subject is a molar residual, off to the side, a side effect of desiring-machines, not a single center from which desire is born" (165).

 Raul Sanchez argues in his 2012 article, "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity," that the subject is neither an 'effect' nor an origin or something that precedes a moment of inscription:

"Identity names this singularity, which is neither a precursor to the act of writing nor merely its effect. If we no longer say that identity is expressed through writing, but rather that identity names the moment of inscription-the intrusion or emergence into Judith Butler's "grammatical time of the subject" (117)-yet is only available in and after writing as writing's condition of possibility, then we can also say that identity manifests, at once metaphorically and materially, in both the figure and the body of the writing-subject. These claims make it possible to recognize that there is neither an origin story for the "moment" of inscription nor an aporetic limit at which one must hover perpetually. They make it possible to name the act of writing, the moment of inscription, as that which marks a convergence of time, space, and linguistic code at the production of a text. More important, they make it possible-necessary, actually-to use this very convergence to embody, figuratively and empirically, the convergence itself. They make possible the writing-subject as both thing and word, object and concept."

The writing-subject in this sense is an event -- an event that draws together all of the actants, human and nonhuman. As Latour puts it in We have Never Been Modern, "History does something. Each entity is an event" (81). 

Ok, so the writing subject is linked to an act of inscription. Is writing simply any act of inscription? In broad terms, yes, it is. Every event leaves traces -- I would be tempted to say irreversible 'traces'. "Writing" ever since writing scholars' took notice of Jacques Derrida, has been refigured as 'the trace' in general. "Writing" is not necessarily about conscious invention and arrangement of an essay, but writing could be as simple as a mark on a wall or an animal's tracks. 

If this is truly the case, then scholars of "writing studies" are able to study practically anything as writing, as acts of inscription, of traces. My question, however, is what do we get by understanding in terms of 'writing' rather than 'rhetoric'? Are there not rhetorical limitations to the word 'writing'? Although his tone bothers me, I can't shake Ian Bogost's point in Alien Phenomenology that, "writing is only one form of being" (90). Of course, the problem with his statement is how he slips from 'writing' to "language" and then proceeds to deny the medium of writing and even language of a certain materiality, so brilliantly traced by Derrida. Bogost writes that in contrast to philosophical works (with the exceptions of Derrida, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein) "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books. The carpenter, by contrast, must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). Here Bogost makes two mistakes: 1) seeing Derrida's form as a "book," when Derrida explicitly attempted to subvert that very medium, and 2) denying the inseparable bond between medium/form and content. 

In other words, Bogost makes no meaningful distinction between writing/carpentry outside of the fact that carpentry seems to lead us to 'doing philosophy' with objects other than the pen and paper. But if we understand writing as any trace, then these 'carpentry' projects of philosophy are just as much 'writing' as they are carpentry. Furthermore, the 'designation' writing, given its rigorous deconstruction by Derrida, avoids some of the baggage that 'carpentry' contains -- an emphasis on the 'hand made', for instance. 

Thus, carpentry just becomes a better metaphor for describing the practice of 'philosophy'. But what exactly is 'philosophical' about Bogost's projects? Of course this depends on our definition of philosophy, but if philosophy is the "invention of concepts" as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then Bogost's projects are not philosophy, even if they contain an 'affect' or a 'percept', which is the domain, according to D&G of ART. 

Within Derrida's understanding of writing, however, such art works would be considered "writing." But what do we get from describing artworks within a general system of writing? Does it erase the specificity of it being art or does it put into question the boundaries of what constitutes the art "work" (does it include all of the 'writing' and 'responses' that take place because of it? . . .and any possible future response?). 

Currently, I'm trying to adapt a significant piece of my writing on BioArt to a writing posthumanism. In my original piece, I framed the project in terms that would preserve these works as art, even if, at the same time, the artwork is always within a complex system of writing events, which will affect the function and efficacy of the artwork (critics reviews, theoretical statements from the artists, etc.). 

The question I have for myself is: what is it about BIOART that makes visible art as entwined within a writing system of human and nonhuman actants? My hunch is that by using 'life' materials as their medium, there is an increased probability of the artwork to not simply be the subject of writing surrounding it, but 'writes us' in some unique way. There is an unpredictableness, a propensity for failure that can be made visible through Bioart that reveals the general conditions of artworks: the possibility of their 'failure'. However, it is precisely the failure of BioArt that gives it's significance for biotechnological practices because the force of this failure is to recognize our inability to simply program and control life through genetic coding or otherwise. We can substitute "writing" for genetic coding, since there is no real way to control, in this age, the effects of our writing practices. What is the fate of this blogpost? What videos go viral? BioArt also is potent example of how our best laid plans can be foiled by nonhuman agency. 

But then, does BioArt simply become a stand in for any "writing?" Indeed, could not the same point be made with other artworks or even other inscriptions? Is there something that BioArt adds to our understanding of 'general writing' (that is, 'writing studies') or is the point of writing studies to show the very specificity of this writing practice? But then would we not succumb to the temptation of 'rhetorical analysis'? What words, what concepts does BioArt suggest that would be an essential supplement to our understanding of writing-as-system? 

These are the issues I am struggling with as I attempt to integrate some very specific research on an important group of artists and artworks in the biotechnological age. 

"Science" in the Humanities

I can't remember when, but it may have been over drinks and a bonfire, a friend of mine, who has a background in science remarked that she thinks the humanities have a reductive straw-man concept of what science "is" and tries to do. Despite having little background in formal science education, I have also thought that this may be the case, since  "science" is hardly a unified field as Terrence over at Agent Swarm recently has pointed out (echoed by Adam over at und fur sich -- I'm not sure which post came first).

 I spent some time with a friend who was doing research in immunology and learned that immunologists see the "ecological" sciences as less sciences. In other words, there is just as much debate between the sciences (because, again, scientific paradigms are not unified and are splintered into different focuses that have different goals) as in the humanities (Literature proper vs. 'rhetoric and composition' vs. 'new media' vs. 'theory' vs. digital humanities -- I'm far from suggesting these don't interpenetrate one another, but these are some of the disciplinary identities that are currently floating around). 

Without a doubt, as Levi Bryant has emphasized in his posts, the humanities should not shun science, but at the same time, do we not have a different relationship with knowledge? I realize that I am essentializing "the humanities," as much as we have essentialized "science," so let me narrow it down to "English," which at UF is a strange hybrid of literature, composition, philosophy, "theory," psychoanalysis, ethnography, etc. etc. We have a very "broad" definition of our department. Anyway, I am getting away from my point. . .

Despite my misgivings of treating science as a unified field or reducing science to one dominant way of epistemology or ontology, I would like to affirm that our treatment of the sciences is about on par with what I am going to call "pop science" books, written by renown scientists for the general public. 

In the public intellectual sphere of books like Regenesis (discussed in more detail below), The Selfish Gene, Consilience, there is just as much "essentializing" and "theorizing" and "speculating" about where science is taking us as in academic articles in the humanities. In some cases, academic theorists go into even more detail about how these theories are constructed. For instance, Thierry Bardini in Junkware spends 3 chapters discussing the genesis of Watson and Crick's theory of DNA, mobilizing a specific critique that has political ramifications of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman narrativizes the cybernetic conferences to bring forth the tensions and decisions that were made in order to come to agreement about the field. Some may find these tedious, but I find them fascinating as they take into account the "material" reality outside the laboratory (in letters, conference presentations, transcripts, etc.) that eventually result in a scientific "movement" or "discovery" reported in the newspaper under the headlines "science." Hayles and Bardini both take seriously Sherry Turkle's demand at the end of Evocative Objects that we must tell new stories, counternarratives to the one presented by the mainstream media. 

The question for me is how our stories are different from the "narrativizing" of science we find on our pop science book shelves aimed toward the general public? But even if our stories are at the level of abstraction or at the level of the regulative genres of writing/recording (see Spinuzzi) that help form a scientific discipline and are the same "level" as the popular science books, we should at least be OK with that since even the "hard scientists" when explaining the implications of their works resort to the same kind of rhetoric, sometimes sacrificing an "interesting anecdote" for a hard critique of dominant paradigms. 

In order to illustrate further what I mean, I want to take George Church's and Ed Regis's recent text, Regenesis into account. I saw Church on The Colbert Report discussing his new book and figured I had to read it as the chapter titles dealt with issues I raised in my thesis. I would post the interview, but it is currently unavailable. . .I'm not sure why. Probably copyright issues. 

Regenesis, Biohacking, and Transhumanism

Instead of buying this text due to fund restriction and since it was not in our library yet, I just went to the local Barnes and Noble and causually "browsed" the book (speed skimmed it in an academic fashion). Undoubtedly, the book contained some scientific descriptions as well as narrative expositions of the origins of Genetic technologies. The subtitle is "How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves." I've noticed that a lot of the subtitles of pop science books directly address an individual reader, which suggests that it will serve to teach them something that will give them an ability to do x,y, or z. These titles are sexy and make you want to read them. So this one claims that synthetic biology will reinvent us in some major way. I'm not disagreeing, but a scientific paper (and even a humanities paper) would hardly make such claims within the title. 

Let us move to the rhetoric of the inside flap: 

"Imagine a future in which human beings have become immune to all viruses, in which bacteria can custom-produce everyday items, like a drinking cup, or generate enough electricity to end oil dependency. Building a house would entail no more work than planting a seed in the ground. These scenarios may seem far-fetched, but pioneering geneticist George Church and science writer Ed Regis show that synthetic biology is bringing us ever closer to making such visions a reality.

In Regenesis, Church and Regis explore the possibilities—and perils—of the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, in which living organisms are selectively altered by modifying substantial portions of their genomes, allows for the creation of entirely new species of organisms. Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future. Indeed, as Church and Regis show, it even enables us to revisit crucial points in the evolution of life and, through synthetic biological techniques, choose different paths from those nature originally took.

Such exploits will involve far more than just microbial tinkering. Full-blown genomic engineering will make possible incredible feats, from resurrecting woolly mammoths and other extinct organisms to creating mirror life forms with a molecular structure the opposite of our own. These technologies—far from the out-of-control nightmare depicted in science fiction—have the power to improve human and animal health, increase our intelligence, enhance our memory, and even extend our life span.

A breathtaking look at the potential of this world-changing technology, Regenesis is nothing less than a guide to the future of life.

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First, I want to point out that there is a concrete division (at least at this level of discouse) between 'nature' and human life: "Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future."

As most writing teachers know, "writing" is never fully in our control (nor is language) so to "write our own future" is still to live with contingency. This is a small point, but I think that claiming that we can now "write" our biological future is in essence to say that we are in control of where we are going and this assumes that we know who this "we" is (or who the "we" ought to be).

Second, note the contrast between the dreaded science fiction "out of control nightmare" with the "powers" of these new technologies. These "powers" are most extensively explored in the "epigenetic epilogue," titled "+1 year, The End of the Beginning, Transhumanism and the Panspermia Era (Societal Risks and Countermeasures)" This is the chapter I read closely and the one I want to focus on. Due to the method I chose to encounter this text, I will be unable to cite exact passages.

The chapter mainly is mainly addressing the problem of control, drawing on Francis Fukuyama and Ray Kurzweil. Although Fukuyama makes a decent argument in his text, both he and Kurzweil, although on opposite sides of the spectrum, both have an essentialized view of the human. Fukuyama uses statistics and Kurzweil betrays his concept in his discussions of the future. Fukuyama sees our "Posthuman future" as an immanent disaster and Kurzweil reads our posthuman future as an immanent transformation of human transcendence and control. Church and Regis straddle this line of thinking, erring on the side of Kurzweil.

One movement discussed briefly, and which I discuss in more detail in my thesis, is "Biohacking." Regis and Church seem to think this is a real threat to the control of biological life, and offer some general ways that we might keep it under control of experts. But as I point out, these tinkerers are doing things mostly on 6th or 7th grade level and the threat of bioterrorism is greatly exaggerated in popular discourse. Still, Regis and Church, though eschewing his paranoia, follow Fukuyama in arguing that problems will largely be a manner of control and regulation, while still recognizing the difficutly of enforcement of possible regulations.

There is no discussion of BioArt, which of course, serves no utilitarian value for the human race, so why discuss it in a book on what science will be able to do for us next? (catch my sarcastic tone?)

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I bring up Regenesis to show that popular science books by scientists are not enough and that the humanities does have a role to play in theorizing concepts and rhetoric of science (and various sciences -- physics, ecology, immunology) and that the detail and rigor we can bring to the table is at least on par with books by scientists that claim they can predict or illustrate what developments in science have to offer.
I don't think these scientists would disagree with me as ultimately Regenesis ends with a lot of questions (left unanswered -- as they should be) about the ethics and politics of scientific experimentation.

Popular science works pepper their texts with formulations from great authors, theorists, and philosophers in order to frame their theories in a more interesting and accessible manner. Humanistic discourse is usually the clothing that dresses up scientific discourse. This is really no different from the humanities using concepts and paradigms of the sciences to expand our own discursive horizons.

Art, the Irrepeatable, and the violence of writing on life

Eduardo Kac argues that the distinction between science and art is the type of knowledge produced: "While in science the elimination of what is not repeatable produces the field where knowledge is possible, in art the irrepeatable is celebrated as the singularity that enables aesthetic knowledge" (192). Indeed, much of what I have read on BioArt emphasizes this idea that the art is irrepeatable. Now, maybe I"m conflating irrepeatable with non-iterable, but I am interested in thinking about how this art is iterable. Indeed, I want to make the argument that in order for BioArt to truly engage its issues with technoscientific production and biopolitics, it must be disseminated through some form of writing, whether that be text, image, or video. Furthermore, BioArt itself is a kind of writing; we may at first be reluctant to admit this since we generally assume that writing is the 'dead letter' rather than living word. How could we "write" with living material? What is a "living writing," a "life writing." But artists, for example, Adam Zaretsky, speak of their work in terms of the signature. He writes,

the habit of inserting an engineered plasmid into the genome of a cell line or organism is a physical artifact that stems from the mortal desire for lasting signature. These still born scupltures, in accord with the libidinal economy of multi-generational directionality, have been impressed upon for the record alone. Consider their mutations to be a sort of genetic graffiti. 

Genetic graffiti--a transgressive form of writing.

Eduardo Kac writes that the green glow of Alba functions as a kind of "social marker" as opposed to a "biomarker," which has many different meanings depending on the field. I want to look into these meanings and see how this metaphor could be extended to more than just Kac's work.

Kac is extremely aware of the symbolic and semiotic elements of his work, as he has deemed his Alba Flag as a "social marker, a beacon of her absence" and has created a work titled Lagoglyphs, a "rabbitographic form of writing" which is a "visual language that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the [series] stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of discourse generated through, with, and around Kac's GFP bunny" (Imaginary Science 66).

I think we should take seriously this idea of writing in BioArt--the marks, cuts, incisions--the violent traces inscribed upon life by these artist-scientists; this can lead us to a powerful understanding, through visualization and material embodiment, to an understanding of the violence of writing and the artistic 'signature'.

Possible Thesis

As biotechnology makes genetic engineering an immanent inevitability, many people are questioning whether we should mess with Nature. Whether the critics are religious or not, the popular phrase we hear more and more, that we are "playing God," suggest that through genetic manipulation of code, we will be able to completely control the immaterial and material world. This makes us the new kind of "author" figure, but this time, rather than writing about the meaning of life, we are writing on life. The fear that geneticists are "playing God," if we take into account the analogy that God is the author of the Book of the World, assumes that the author has complete control over the text of the world and  various readers are  there to merely decipher it. Perhaps if we deciphered the creation of God, we could understand the purpose of life. 

But such a view is not possible in this post-Nietzschean era--God is dead. The Author is dead. 

What I mean to suggest by this parallel is that BioArtists attempt to show that they cannot control life as a God/Author, but nor are they simply readers. Just as we realize that language resists transparent meaning and manipulation, BioArt resists the idea that we could ever read or communicate life in its entirety through deciphering a code. Indeed, BioArtists foreground the idea that life resists code, like a language. Furthermore,  just as New Media artists and theorists have been working for years to insist on the materiality of digital information, so BioArt insists on the materiality of genetic information. BioArtists may begin at the genetic level or the tissue level, but wherever they may begin, each visualizes the materiality of their medium and their embeddness in a complex ecological system that make up their "work." 

Bar notes

So last night--went to a bar to sing Karaoke. Brought along my "thesis" questions. First I will list the questions, then I will transfer my inebriated handwriting to this digital form. I must admit--this is probably not going to make any sense (not that my blogs make sense generally)--but I think of it as a way of archiving an intense brainstorming session.

Questions

1.) Is BioArt a posthuman(ist) art?

2.) What is the relationship between BioARt and net.Art/Digital art

3.) What makes BioArt, "art"

4.) What happens to the impact/effects of BioArt when it is mediated through images, criticism, websites, etc. Is it never not mediated?

5.) Does manipulating living tissue/genetics make something automatically "BioArt"? (here i have written "no!"

6.) Does BioArt actually have to be 'made' in order to have an impact/effect? (I have written here "yes, but only as a way to make it visible")

7.) How does the Tissue Culture and Art Project's work differ from the deployment of these techniques in a "technoscience" context? '

8.) What is the relationship of BioArt to "Animal Studies"?

9.) How does BioArt relate to science fiction?

10.) How is BioArt a form of writing? (this is something I explored extensively last night)

11.) What does BioArt have to offer theoretical humanities/Discourse? (this relates to the Animal Studies question)

12.) Does BioArt have to be visual/visible?

13.) Is BioArt a "practice" or an "art object" or both or neither?

14.) Does BioArt have to manipulate 'living' matter in order to be considered BioArt?

15.) What ethical and political responsibilities do we have to BioArt creations? (this moves beyond my scope)

16.) How can we think of BioArt so that it supports the idea that human beings are "always already technological"? (see David Wills, Dorsality)

17.) What is the relationship between telepresence of Kac and transgenic/BioArt?

18). Is BioArt the artform of the biopolitical, as elucidated by Foucault or Hardt and Negri?


Notes

Art is a practice--a mode of understanding rather than art as an "object" --> This helps us break down the distinctions between so called 'visual' art and 'other' art (textual, material, whatever)

See Claire Pentecost on breaking down and changing artistic practices as the key to opening the public to science.

BioArt's connection with digital or NetArt is its distribution--the very fact that I can access BioArt through digital media shows that its impact does not depend on physical proximity (this may relate somehow to Kac and telepresence)

BioArt is fruitful for Posthumanism because it questions the ontological distinction between human and animal as well as human and machine.

Descartes compares animals with machines--perhaps the mistake is not this conflation, but rather the idea that somehow we are somehow different--we are not machinic (we are not technological). See Derrida "Animal"

It is here ^ perhaps that we need to think agency.

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Regarding whether BioArt is the Art of the Biopolitical --> if the biopolitical is defined as regarding the circulation of ideas, images, etc. without being subject to the law of scarcity. Look back at the H&N's Commonwealth. 


I"m still thinking about this idea that it (BioArt) is writing in two senses of the word

1.) Makes a mark, trace, not only that but it challenges the easy assumptoins about "who does the writing" ? (I think here I am thinking of the 'artwork' created by animals)

ex: The "killing ritual" (in Tissue culture and art project) is the audience's 'writing' the organism -- "the letter killeth"

2.) Kac's "Genesis" the light 'writes' on the organism/gene, altering the phrase from the bible--it is a "re-writing" (see Kac on Genesis) --See Barthes on photography as light directly contacting the surface.

Furthermore, an artwork like Kac's has been appropriated/parodied by Sonya Rapaport (its here when I really start to think about BioArt and writing)

art may be about the 'singular' (see Kac), but just like a signature, it creates the possibility of its iteration in a different context. Indeed, in one sense, because the artwork is 'displayed' by different museums (easy to show by citing websites)

BUT what about the killing ritual? This at once makes the artwork iterable through different media  and at the same time (?) irrepeatable with the same "object", but if art is not about the OBJECT per se this hardly matters-- (aside: See Derrida on Heidegger's "grasping"-- Geschlecht II?)

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Perhaps the difference between technoscience's bio manipulations is the difference between creating na object for 'use' and creating a 'context' (see Kac) or a making visible what remain invisible (see Wolfe on GFP bunny and the architecture chapter--8). Or that an artwork disrupts such an easy 'use' appropriation OR that the technoscientists may not realize that they are creating something (I think maybe here I should look back at Eugene Thacker about 'net.Art' and science fiction)

Again let me re-iterate-- the artwork is iterable but not based on its "objectness" this STILL does nto mean that its materiality doesn't matter. See Derrida "Limited Ink II" on his notion of "materiality" (comes from reading de Man)

BioArt is also writing because it functions as a creation of form (that is kind of 'unform') --I think here I was thinking of Wolfe's discussion of the "formlessness" of the architecture is What is Posthumanism -->

Writing communicates not humans--by marks and traces. The "perception" may be incommunicable, but the communication is iterable. Communication = Writing (translating Luhmann's terms to Derrida's). That is "writing" is something separate from language (or can be. . .)

Look back at Fatal Strategies for Baudrillard's biological tropes.

Cyborg Manifesto-- Writing and "chimeras"

Is it the idea that art allows for an openness to interpretation of its 'function' whereas 'technoscience' is not critical? It only seeks to produce a usable object.

This gets us back into the discussion of Heidegger on "Origin of Work of Art" and Derrida's critique of it--need to look into that. present-at-hand vs. ready-to-hand. See Verbeek on how art is something different.

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Writing is communication--language is a media (see Wolfe on Luhmann)

Maybe its that perception always implies some kind of "representation" or that communication is always a representation and perception is something different.

Does it matter that the artworks are actually created?

Yes, because only through actually doing it can we show the limits of the techniques/creations/contestable futures even if the 'possibilities' could be shown through image or discourse--some other form of writing.

Perhaps rather than thinking transgenic art (Kac's Genesis, etc). is an "invisible aesthetics" (see Bardini) we need to think how form the perspective of writing and rhetoric art as defined by Luhmann "makes visible" the invisible (see Derrida in Gift of Death on visible/invisible/absolutely invisible)

Does Kac's work make visible the 'invisible victims" (Catts and Zurr's terms)

Yes beacause from the perspective of a consumer of food, for instance, the process of growing is hidding and the visibility of the transgenic food becomes naturalized.

Because it is 'dialogic" (see Kac for definition) it allows the audience to participate to the same degree as the Catts and Zurr installation with its killing/feeding rituals--at least for most of the participants. We need to look at the degree of participation present in Stelarc's work as well.

Kac's work depends on an "observer" (second order?) Some of Tissue Culture and Art Project depends on the observer (I'm not quite sure what I was thinking here. . .I think I was trying to think about how the "worry dolls" of Catts and Zurr effectively function in a dialogic manner similar to Kac's work).

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Thesis Speculations--On a Posthuman Critical Dystopia/Utopia

I have been wracking my brains to figure out what framework I want to use for my exploration of BioArt (and BioArt as a problematic term). I have read several texts from both artists themselves and crtics/theorists who have explored BioArt from the perspective of posthumanism and other angles including Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker, Eduardo Kac, Patricia Piccinini, Steve Baker, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Stelarc, and others. Haraway thinks she finds something powerful in thinking ethics as an 'sf-worlding', which she defines as an "invitation to speculate, imagine, feel, and build something better" in order to nurture a "more just and peaceful other globalization" (92, 3). Eugene Thacker has explored how Net.Art can fulfill a 'critical function' of science fiction in an age where our technoscience has become science fiction. Thacker explicitly mentions groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble. These artistic movements do much to de-mystify science through parody and theoretical texts.

Eugene Thacker extends Frederic Jameson and other critics' thoughts on SF literature to net.Art and "new media" art. My question is whether we can apply this--or at least use Thacker's ideas--to look at Bioart. Thacker argues that the point of net.art and new media art is to take the critical function of SF and "re-insert it back into the discourse of contemporary technoscience."But since we live in an age where the fictions of SF literature have been incorporated into technoscience, the classical literary SF is insufficient to critique technoscience. Technoscience creates imaginative futures, but creates them in the mode of what Thacker calls "actualization." That is, the point of technoscience's narratives are to actualize them uncritically--leaving the criticism to culture, popular opinion, and, most likely, the courts. New Media/net.Art, in contrast, is in the mode of potentialization: "Regarded as potentiality, as the work of imagining critical futures, science fiction is not locked into the narrow path of simply realizing the future or actualizing it" (Thacker 158). Thacker concludes with the main contrast between SF literary art and the New Media art of which he speaks:

Whereas literary science fiction was limited to describing technologies in exrapolative, near future scenarios, new media and net.art contain the capacity to actually embody and utilize these future technologies in radically new ways [and ask] important questions concerning the future of the human-machine relationship. (158)

 A couple things about this. For people like Jameson and Suvin, the actual technologies that are "extrapolated" are not really considered in their concrete possibility. Rather, reading Jameson, we see him trying to see the big picture of an other world that would be alternative to the current system of global capitalism. He looks at the larger structure of the SF work using interpretive frameworks such as the Greimasian square. Thus, what differs is not only the embodiment of these technologies (more on that later), but also that for Thacker, the specific imaginings and extrapolations ask posthuman questions that tie the political to the biological--the biopolitical. As Donna Haraway puts it, the ethics (and perhaps this is another difference between Jameson and Haraway et. al.--complicated material ethics comes up in addition to macro-political orders and alternative worlds and utopias) "is in the whole ontological apparatus, its thick complexity, int he naturecultures of being in technoculture that join cells and people in a dance of becoming" (138, When Species Meet). Perhaps (and I only mention this as something to be explored later) we can explore Jameson's sense of the power of totalization and closure in order to open up new possibilities and that introduced by Nikalas Luhmann, as explored by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism--are they similar? For Jameson, there is a logic of total revolution; for Haraway, the micropolitical contributes to the macro--the metaphor shifts from revolution to terms from biology--ecology, environment, etc.

Aside from these differences (which I believe give more credence to the actual figures in the text rather than as dismissing them as extrapolations or allegories for larger political structures), because bioartists (even more so, I might argue, than net.Artists) participate in the techniques of technoscience and also uses new media in radical ways, they are able to, in the words of Clair Pentecost, change "the nature of art itself and the apparatus of its distribution" which will help to redefine the public's relationship to science (Pentecost 116), helping to erode boundaries "between research conducted within scientific laboratories and experiments taking place outside" (de Costa 376).

In other words,  we might say that whereas literary fiction, according to Jameson, estranges the present by masking it's particular content, new media art (and by extension BioArt) changes it by transforming its form--although this may be too radical of a claim, and a claim I would have to back up with a lot more evidence, particularly due to the importance Jameson ascribes to form in all his work (and the fiction and cultural objects he works with).

Maybe I should stick here with Pentecost's language--these artists attempt to change art's apparatus of distribution. Rather than estranging us from science, or using science as a  trope for a deeper political structure, BioArt at its core seeks to de-mystify science by encouraging participation in the artwork (even though, I suppose, SF invites the same type of criticism). By looking at science fiction as a genre in which the particular technologies "extrapolated" do not really matter--we do an injustice to SF's engagement

I am arguing myself out of my initial claims, but I"ll try and press on, knowing that I may be making unfair distinctions to serve my own ends. Perhaps we can look at another theorist/artist's conceptual distinction, Eduardo Kac. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of the dialogical, Kac reconfigures and radicalizes it. Whereas for Bakhtin, literature is inherently dialogical, Kac literalizes this concept and argues that most literature and even most net.Art (referring back to Thacker) is still monologic--even if it remains interactive:

Naturally, dialogic art is interactive, but dialogism in electronic art must not be confused with interactivity. many interactive electronic artworks are monologic, for example, a CD-ROM, or a self-contained website. (104)

 So perhaps we can say, agreeing with Thacker that there is a distinction to be made, that rhetorical artistic projects that use new media, but are merely websites rather than incorporating performance, "wet" elements, or some sort of 'live' interaction with the audience, are not "dialogic."

Kac's work strives to be "dialogic," which he relates to another key concept, telepresence:

Crucial in the context of dialogic experimentation in the arts is the understanding that radical works of art cannot be limited by visuality; instead they are lived experiences based on contextual reciprocity (the context of the experience as reciprocal; i.e. it enables one to take the intiative to interfere and alter the experience. (Kac 111)

 Thus, artists are the "creators of contexts," rather than a creator of "works." Dialogic art allows the audience to participate and to change the artwork, whereas "interactive" would mean that they follow a set of patterns that cannot be changed. In this sense, then, Sonya Rappaport's quest to "redeem" Kac's artwork Genesis remains, perhaps, "interactive," but not truly dialogic. Her website for the Golem gene shows her plans for the work and allows the reader a kind of freedom to navigate the website and interpret what she is trying to do, but the view of the site is not welcome to change the code of it--that is, "change" the artwork (her work can be found here: http://users.lmi.net/sonyarap/redeeming/index.html.) In contrast, Kac's initial exhibit, allowed users online to click a button in order to change the artwork. He writes in his essay "Genesis,"

Employing the smallest gesture of the on-line world--the click--participants can modify the genetic makeup of an organism located in a remote gallery. This unique circumstance makes evident, on the one hand, the impending ease with which genetic engineering trickles down into the most ordinary level of experience. On the other, it highlights the paradoxical conditions of the nonexpert in the age of biotechnology. To click or not to click is not only an ethical decision, but a symbolic one [. . .] In either case, the participant faces an ethical dilemma and is implicated in the process. (252)

--But it needs to be said: I can no longer "participate" in this artwork--I am an outside viewer, trying to understand and interpret the artwork purely from its documentation. A question: once the artwork is "over" --once the performance is done--does the artwork remain "dialogic"? Or does the artwork become just as "monologic" as the website or piece of literature---maybe even more so (the website is still 'interactive'). In other words, do the distinctions Thacker made between literary creation and net.Art/new media art still hold and do Kac's work maintain a "dialogic" dimension in his sense? What is the significance of Kac's engagement of the "nonexpert" in terms of the demystification and democratization of science?

To begin to address these questions I plan to look at some of the arguments in Jens Hauser's brilliant essay in Tactical Biopolitics, "Observations on Art of on an Growing Interest: Toward a Phenomenological Approach to Art Involving Biotechnology."  More on that in another blog post.


I'd like to explore these very issues in terms of Kac's work, but also that of the Critical Art Ensemble, and especially the Tissue Culture and Art Project, led by Oron Catts and Ionatt Zurr.

Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood

In Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, the narrative voice, assumed to be that of the unnamed protagonist, thinks:

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality (89)

McCarthy's novel is perhaps one of the most popular dystopian novels to come out in the last couple decades. The novel shows a bleak post-apocalyptic world where vegetation, animals, and most human beings have become extinct. The cause of the apocalypse is left in the dark, although we are told that there was a flash of light. Extinction has led to the emptying of language and its power. The only ethical actions left are between the few nomadic human beings left scrounging for scraps of food and a semblance of saftey.

But why am I speaking about The Road? Perhaps because Atwood offers a different kind of dystopia. Indeed, now that I re-think it, it is hard to think of Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood as post-apocalyptic, even though the main characters sometimes speak from a position after the "apocalyptic" event. But this is an apocalypse in reverse: it is not the wiping out of all of the earthly and the animal, leaving the solitary humans to carry the "fire," but rather the extinction of a majority of the human race through a carefully planned (but surreptitious) bioterrorist act, resulting in a plague. The human race has (apparently) been replaced by human made, transgenic organism referred to as the "Crakers." They are engineered to behave simiarily to animals in some ways (such as their mating rituals) but are also model human specimens with perfect bodies. Furthermore, the Crakers also possess language, although at the time of the books they have a limited vocabulary.

I want to look at the function of language, particularly related to art and rhetoric, in both Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood.  Snowman/Jimmy, who is the main protagonist in Oryx and Crake is a rhetorician and a "word person." He is a "word person" in the sense that this is what he is good at and in the sense that he uses language in order to manipulate others. In the "present" of the novel (although this is a problematic designation itself--most of the novel takes place as a flashback), Snowman currently plays the position of a priest to the Crakers. He has improvised a whole mythology about where the Crakers come from and pretends to "talk" to Crake through his watch. Crake, who we will later find out plays a Mad Scientist kind of role in the text, did help "create" the Crakers, but not as the God Snowman/Jimmy makes him out to be.

Jimmy (before he becomes "snowman") majores in Problematics at the Martha Graham Academy. Martha Graham Academy seems like the equivalent of a Liberal Arts and Humanities college. The college was set up by "liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York" and Jimmy compares the college to "studying latin, or book-binding: pleasent to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything" (187). However, the college tries for utilty: "Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills, ran the motto underneath the original Latin motto, which was Ars Longa Vita Brevis [Art is long, life is brief]" (188).

Indeed, Jimmy does have "employable skills" because Crake eventually hires him to help sell the BlyssPluss pill, the pill that secretely contains the plague that will wipe humans off the face of the earth. Later in the novel, when Crake tells Jimmy what his Paradice project is aiming for "immortality," Crake explains:

Immortality, said Crake, is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it an the fear of it, then immortality is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out he fear and you'll be. . . (303).

Jimmy says that that sounds like "Applied Rhetoric 101." Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, persuades people that they can achieve "immortality," but only if we understand and define immortality in this way. Crake says the Crakers are "floor models" that represent the "art of the possible" rather than the kind of being everyone would want. Of course the irony to this, as we soon find out, is that Crake means for the Crakers to replace the human race rather than serve human interests. Immortality in Crake's sense is really only given to the Crakers.

Jimmy functions as an Adman (rather and Adam), who first works at spinning products, then spins a tale for the Crakers that will satisfy their curiosity. But Jimmy seems to be much more interested in words beyond their utilitarian use (at least the rhetorical use put to advertising). That is to say, Jimmy/Snowman still finds words "useful" but mostly for himself. Examples:

"You scoundrel," says Snowman out loud. It's a fine word, scoundrel; one of the golden oldies. (191)

He compiled lists of old words too--words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful application in today's world, or toady's world, as Jimmy sometimes deliberately misspelled it on his term papers [. . .] He memorized these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant. He'd developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned int he woods and it was his duty to rescue them. (195)

Supposing, that is, he could manage to sleep. At night he'd lie awake, berating himself, bemoaning his fate. Berating, bemoaning, useful words. Doldrums. Lovelorn. Leman. Forsaken. Queynt. (312)

Sometimes he'd turn off the sound, whisper words to himself. Succulent. Morphology. Purblind. Quarto. Frass. It had a calming effect. (344)

A list of words without apparent connection one to the other. Rather, a seemingly random list that comforts Snowman. He enjoys listing these words for their "precision and suggestiveness." In contrast (?) to Jimmy's logophilia, Amanda, a girlfriend of Jimmy's, was an "image person, not a word person" (244). Amanda is a bioartist who "vulturizes" words:

The idea was to take a truckload of large dead-animal parts to vacant fields or the parking lots of abandoned factories and arrange them in the shapes of words, wait until the vultures had descended and were tearing them aparnt, then photograph the whole scene from a helicoptor [. . .] The words she vulturized--her term--had to have four letters. She gave a great deal of thought to them: each letter of the alphabet has a vibe, a plus or minus charge, so the words had to be selected with care. Vulturizing brough them to life, was her concept, and then it killed them. (245).

The words she "vulturizes" are not the precise, old words that Jimmy loved so much, but words like "PAIN," "WHOM," and "GUTS," and, finally, "LOVE." Is this an erasing of language or its materialization (or both?). Perhaps we could contrast this vulturization with what Jimmy is hired to do based on his dissertation about Self-Help books. These words are all concepts or nouns, whereas Jimmy claims "the adjectives change [. . .] Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives" (246). How to describe the noun--how do we sell the noun rather than materialize it/make it 'live'. The self-help process is explicitly connected to Crake's work at the Paradice dome, as it is also described as the "art of the possible [. . .] But with no guarantees, of course" (246).

No guarantees. Para-dice.

I'm not sure what to do with the phrase the "art of the possible." In a way, Crake's project is more similar to certain "bioart" (transgenics, genomic art, tissue culture, etc.) than Amanda's Vulturizing. Bioart, however, while creating the possible. also show sthe limits of the possible. Perhaps the "vulturizing" speaks to the limits of language?

Furthermore, what does "vulturizing" have to do with writing? In Year of the Flood we find out that 'writing' was discouraged by the group the God's Gardeners, a group that Amanda had once been a part in. Ren, one of the protagonists, tells us that the Gardeners thought writing was "dangerous" because "your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you" (6). They also have a theological reason goes back to Plato:

They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever and the Spirit isn't a thing. (6)

 The series Amanda does she names The Living Word--"she said for a joke it was inspired by the Gardeners because they'd repressed us so much about writing things down" (56).

I have really fascinated with so-called "Bioart" in the past couple months.The question for me is--what constitutes "bioart" in the novels? Is Crake's project a kind of 'bioart'? Is the bioterrorist group, MaddAdam also doing a kind of "bioart" or, to use the language of a recent collection of essays by Beatriz de Costa, "tactical biopolitics"? Amanda's art is relatively harmless--symbolically powerful, but tactically almost useless. She creates images and not new forms of life.

In an essay in Tactical Biopolitics (my computer is out of service at the moment, so I cannot find the exact quote, essay, or author), the author claims that bioart tends to be transmitted through 'documentation' of the art event (including photographs) rather than seeing the art itself. Amanda's project then would fit this kind of art. Only a very few people have seen this artwork first-hand and rely on accounts--witnesses, if you will.

On this topic, allow me close these scattered reflections on these two powerful books with an acknowledgment of their extensions. For both Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood, Atwood has created websites: www.oryxandcrake.com  and www.yearoftheflood.com  I was half hoping these would experimental websites, a la the Critical Art Ensembles Cult of the New Eve, but the site was relatively easy and standard to navigate--except for a couple things.

God's Gardeners are a fiction created by the author, but it seems that they have burst out of the book into the world. Someone actually set the Gardener's hymns to music. This is pretty cool in itself (and a little wierd), but Atwood has taken it even farther and, luckily, there is someone to document it:


In the Wake of the Flood (Teaser) from filmswelike on Vimeo.

Atwood says in this video teaser that she thinks that more people "would attempt to save the planet if they believed it was their duty," which seemingly endorses the God's Gardener's message. Furthermore, for the book release, people were given scripts (including hymns) and put on their own show of the book, an interesting and artistic way for people to experience the book and completely revoultionizing the idea of a 'book tour'. This may relate to other fan communities' projects springing up for various books/series.

I'm a bit put off by Atwood's serious suggestion of making a kind of religion out of protecting the environment and the earth. The Year of the Flood pokes fun at the God's Gardener's and its hard not to read the text as satirical. However, we would have to admit that the God's Gardener's are really some of the only people to survive the "waterless flood" and they are flexible in their creeds and beliefs. God's Gardener's actually come across as incredibly practical as well as 'human' in the sense of fallen, imperfect, beings.

But, and this is another question I'd like to explore, are the texts "posthuman" in a sense? What would Haraway's take on the text be? Derrida's? I am not suggesting that we merely dismiss the text if it does not hold up to such posthuman (unhuman, whatever) critiques, but rather that the books deal with the same territory in a very accessible and emotional way. Atwood's characters, especially the God's Gardener's are not mere caricatures--they read like plausible human beings. The swear, they lie, they cheat, they break rules, they manipulate, they're hierarchal, secretive, full of love, hate, jealousy, indifference, coldness, warmth, etc. The God's Gardener's life is not a utopia nor an Eden before the Fall. As Adam One says, the Fall is ongoing.  And then, of course, where do the Crakers fit in? Are they the posthumans? What is the role of 'art' in the text and in the new society that seems to form toward the end of Year of the Flood.

I realize I haven't ended yet. When I went to yearoftheflood.com, I clicked on a link called "neat stuff" and looked at the entires. One of them, to my surprise, was Victimless Leather, a project of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, artists I have been recently researching. Little comment was made on Atwood' site about the project. But I will venture to call their art--the art of the possible, in the best possible sense.